Main menu

Monthly Archives: October 2015

I’d normally be going for my Tuesday lunchtime run about now, but I think I’m getting a cold so I’m going to skip it in case the exertion makes it worse. So I decided the next best thing would be to write a blog about running instead… maybe I’ll get slightly fitter by osmosis just from thinking about exercise? … OK, maybe not, but I’m going to write this anyway.

I started the Couch to 5K plan back in late May, in the hope that regular exercise might help me not to feel so tired all the time, as well as a vague sense that it would be nice not to be dying from preventable health problems before I hit 60. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it’s a beginner’s running programme designed to do exactly from the title says: get you from not running at all to being able to run five kilometres, in the space of only nine weeks.

The programme appealed to me, firstly because by the sound of it it’s designed to be achievable for people even less fit than I was at the start; secondly because I could do it outdoors and wouldn’t need a gym membership (I find gyms expensive, uncomfortable and boring… I’d much rather brave the weather, even in Scotland); thirdly because I could do it myself with the aid of just a phone app. I wouldn’t need to join a group or anything, which I didn’t feel like doing yet – I didn’t want that level of commitment or pressure.

So I downloaded the NHS Choices Couch to 5K Android app to my phone and got started. The app is designed to be listened to on headphones while you’re running, with someone called Laura telling you what to do (nothing like my normal life, then… har har). I believe you can also get the programme in the form of MP3s that you can listen to, but the app has a few advantages, such as being able to track how many runs you’ve done, and showing a countdown clock on the screen so you can easily see how long you’ve got left in the current run.

The app mostly seemed pretty good, though I think it must have been pretty new when I started, as there were a few quite major bugs: the countdown timer ran at the wrong speed when the phone screen was off, so to begin with I had to run with the phone in my hand and the screen on the whole time, needlessly draining the battery. Then later on, the app started to crash every time I completed a run. To the developers’ credit, they did fix both of these issues within a few days, and it seemed a lot more stable after that.

But enough about the app… how was the actual running? Surprisingly painless, actually. As I was pretty unfit, I’d expected Couch to 5K to be much more of a struggle than it turned out to be. I think the level of build-up must be set just right as I didn’t have serious trouble with any of the weeks, not even week 5 where the length of time spent continuously running suddenly jumps from 8 minutes up to a very daunting 20 minutes in one go. At first I thought it was strange that the programme reaches 20 minutes with a full four weeks still to go and then ramps up to 30 pretty gradually after that… at the beginning I thought, “surely once I can run 20 minutes non-stop, 30 minutes can’t be that much harder, so why take a full 4 weeks to get there?”. But I think it does make sense; the purpose of the programme isn’t to get you to struggle through a 30 minute run once and then collapse in a quivering heap moaning “That’s it, I’m never running again!” – it’s to make 30 minutes actually seem manageable and give you some confidence in your ability.

The most difficult bit was actually finding the motivation to go out running three times a week and not getting distracted by other things. Once I was actually out there and got going, I almost always enjoyed it. Overall I managed to fit the runs in around the rest of my life quite well, even though I was doing a lot of travelling over the weeks of the plan – I ended up doing runs in Berlin, Glasgow, Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Ghent as well as at home. The only thing that majorly disrupted me was an illness that struck when I had nearly finished (I think I had just started week 8) and then dragged me down for several weeks before I was finally rid of it. At that point I did what the instructions suggested and backtracked a couple of weeks, but I was able to build my momentum back up reasonably easily, and then went on to finally complete the programme. Since then I’ve managed to keep up running for around 30 minutes three times a week, a big improvement on the level of exercise I was getting previously.

Overall, I was pretty happy with Couch to 5K, which succeeded in getting me running greater distances than I would have imagined possible. I’ve definitely noticed an improvement in my general fitness – at Alton Towers, a few of us decided to sprint uphill to the Nemesis queue line to try and ride it one last time before it closed for the night, and a few months ago I know that by the time I got there I would have been doubled over and feeling like I was about to die. But as it was, I felt fine, not even particularly out of breath.

One slight disappointment is that I haven’t lost any weight since I started running, though it’s only a slight disappointment because weight loss wasn’t really my motivation for doing it. I suspect that to lose weight I’d need to actually cut back on what I eat as well as exercising – I’ll probably get round to it one day, but for now I’ve decided there are other priorities, and that I’d rather be slightly overweight than be hungry and irritable all the time (which was what happened last time I made a real effort to lose weight). Anyway, weighing 100 kilos but being able to run 5km has surely got to be an improvement on weighing 100 kilos and not being able to run at all.

This is a very minor, nit-picky point, but I think the programme would be more accurately named “Couch to 30 Minutes”, because it actually measures the time you run for rather than the distance, and I’m not convinced I can actually quite run 5K in 30 minutes – if my rough Google Maps measurements of my normal running routes are accurate, I’ve been doing closer to 4K. But that’s splitting hairs really, because I suspect most people who’ve managed to complete the programme would be capable of running for 5K by the end, even if it takes them a little longer than 30 minutes.

I haven’t decided where to go next with the running. I definitely want to at least keep it up at around this level. Maybe I’ll try doing an actual organised 5K run soon, and then try to build up to a 10K? That seems a daunting prospect, but nowhere near as much as going from nothing to 5K did.

Overall, I’d definitely recommend it to anyone interested in starting running. It starts with a nice gentle introduction but builds you up to being able to do some serious distances, which is all you can ask really. But be careful with your choice of route: ideally you want somewhere with not too many obstructions (so that you don’t have to keep slowing down or stopping), not too many hills (unless you like a challenge!), but most of all, no concrete or tarmac paths! I made the mistake of running round the neighbourhood on the pavements for one of the early runs, but my legs hurt like hell after a few minutes of that. Gravel paths or grass are much, much easier on the shins. I tend to just do laps of my local park. The wooded hill nearby is a nicer location, but the steeply sloped paths add an extra challenge so I have to be feeling energetic for that.

My interest in railways started off about 3 years ago, as simply a desire to squeeze into disused and supposedly-sealed-up tunnels and take photos of them. Normal enough, you might think. But since then it’s grown into a more general interest. I’ve collected a lot of books on railways, especially the ones around Edinburgh and Glasgow (in fact, so many that I’m starting to fear for the structural integrity of my bookshelf). I haven’t yet graduated to skulking on station platforms in all weathers wearing a cagoule and meticulously writing down the numbers of all the passing trains, but it may just be a matter of time now.

My rapidly growing collection of railway books (minus a few that are scattered around the house, wherever I last read them)

One thing I found while researching the history of the rail network was that I always wanted more maps to help me visualise what was going on. There were a few good ones in the books, but I often found myself struggling to imagine how things were actually laid out in the past, and how the old lines fitted in with the present day railways. I wished there was some sort of interactive map out there that would let you change the date and watch how the railway network changed over time, but I couldn’t find anything like that (the closest thing I found was a “Railway Atlas” book that has a map of the present day network in each area with a map from 1922 on the opposite page). So I decided to make one.

(Actually, I decided to make two: one for Edinburgh and one for Glasgow. The Glasgow one is taking a bit longer due to the more complex network on that side of the country, but I’m hoping to release it soon).

The project fitted in well with some other things I’d been wanting to do as well. I’ve always had an interest in maps and have been collecting the Ordnance Survey 1:50000 series (among others) for most of my life now, so when I discovered that Ordnance Survey now release a lot of their data for free, I was excited at the possibilities. I knew that the OS OpenData would make a good basis for my railway maps. I’d also been wanting to experiment with some of the newer web technologies for a while, and coding the viewer for the maps seemed like a good opportunity to do that.

My (mostly) Ordnance Survey map collection. I don’t have a problem. Honest, I don’t. I can stop any time I want to.

As with a lot of projects, it seemed simple at first but once I actually started work on it, I quickly realised it was going to take longer than I thought. There were two main elements to it:

The data sets. To be able to draw the map, I would need detailed data on all of the railway lines and stations in the Edinburgh and Glasgow areas, past and present, including their names, opening and closing dates, which companies built them, and so on. As far as I knew, this information didn’t even exist in any one single source, and if it did it was sure to be under copyright so I wouldn’t be able to just take it and use it. I was going to have to create the data sets pretty much from scratch.

The viewer. Once I had the data, I needed to make a web page that could display it in the form I wanted. I already had quite a clear idea in my head of what this would look like: it would show the map (of course), which could be scrolled and zoomed just like Google or Bing Maps, and there would also be a slider for changing the date. The lines on the map would be colour coded to show which company they were owned by, or their current status, and special lines like tunnels and freight routes would also be shown differently.

It turned out I also needed to build a third major element as well: an editor for creating the data sets. Previously when I’d drawn maps, I’d either used the Google map maker (which has copyright problems if you want to actually use your creations for anything), or drawn them using Inkscape (which, great though it is, isn’t really designed for making maps in). I didn’t think either of those was going to cut it for this project… I needed something better, something that had all the features I needed, but was free from copyright issues. So I decided to make a map editor first.

Step 1: The Editor

At this point, anyone who’s a software engineer and has had it drummed into them “Don’t re-invent the wheel!” is probably shaking their head in exasperation. “You built your own map editor? Why would you do that? Surely there must be one out there already that you could have used!”. To be honest, I’m sure there was, but I don’t regret my decision to make my own. I had three good reasons for doing it that way:

I would learn a lot more.

I could make an editor that was very well suited to the maps I wanted to make. It would have all the features I needed, but wouldn’t be cluttered with extra ones I didn’t need. And I would know exactly how to use it, and would be able to change it if anything started to annoy me.

It would be fun!

I’d had my eye on the Qt GUI toolkit for a while, wanting to give it a try and see if it was better than the others I’d used in the past. So I downloaded Qt Creator and got building.

Of course, I needed some map data first, so I downloaded one of the Ordnance Survey OpenData products: “OS OpenMap Local”, for grid squares NS and NT. (Ordnance Survey products don’t use the latitude and longitude co-ordinates familiar to users of Google Maps or OpenStreetMap; they have their own “National Grid” system that divides the UK into hundred kilometre squares, and uses numerical co-ordinates within those squares). These came in the form of two enormous (nearly a gigabyte altogether) GML files.

GML stands for “Geography Markup Language”, and is a standard XML grammar used for expressing geographical information. The contents of the OpenMap Local files are actually pretty simple conceptually; there’s just a hell of a lot of them! They mostly consist of great long lists of map elements (which can be areas such as forests or lakes or buildings, linear items like roads or railways, or point locations like railway stations) with names, national grid references, and any other relevant information. I wanted to use this information to display a background map in my map editor, on top of which I could draw out the railway routes for my interactive map.

I knew that parsing several hundred megabytes of XML data was likely to be pretty slow, and I didn’t really want the editor to have to do this every time I started it up, so I wrote a Python script that would trawl through the GML files and extract just the bits I was interested in, saving them in a much more compact file format for the actual editor to read.

Now I was onto the fun part: actually displaying the map data on the screen. Thankfully, Qt’s excellent graphics functionality was a great help here. After writing a quick function to translate OS national grid references to screen co-ordinates, and using it to project the map data onto the screen, I was looking at a crude map of Edinburgh. I spent a while tweaking the details to get it to look the way I wanted it: changing the colours of each type of element, changing the line widths for different types of road, hiding the more minor details when the view was zoomed out (OpenMap Local is very detailed and includes the outline for every single building, so trying to display all of that when you’re zoomed out far enough to see an entire city results in a very cluttered map, not to mention one that displays very slowly!).

Edinburgh, courtesy of Ordnance Survey’s OpenData, and my map editor.

Once I had the background map displaying to my satisfaction, I turned my attention to the actual editing functions and finding a suitable way to store the data for the railway map…

Step 2: The Data

The data model for the interactive map is pretty simple. The three main concepts are: segments (simple sections of track without any junctions), stations (pretty self explanatory I hope) and events. An event is a change in one of the segments’ or stations’ properties at a certain date. For example, the segment that represents Scotland Street Tunnel has an event in 1847 when it came into use (a “change of status” event), another in 1862 when it was taken over by the North British Railway company (a “change of company” event), and another in 1868 when it was abandoned (another “change of status”). When the events are complete and accurate, this gives the viewer all the information it needs to work out how the map should look at any particular date. For a file format, I decided on JSON – it was straightforward, easy to access from both Qt and JavaScript, and easy to inspect and edit by hand for debugging.

Editing the data for Scotland Street Tunnel

I considered storing the data in a database rather than a file and having the viewer page query it in the background to retrieve whatever data it needed. But for this particular application, the data is relatively small (about 150KB for the Edinburgh map), and the viewer needs almost all of it pretty much straight away, so throwing a database into the mix would just have added complexity for no good reason.

Creating the data set was by far the most time-consuming part of the whole process. Every railway line and station, past and present, had to be painstakingly added to the map, and then all of the event dates had to be input. I collated the information from many different sources: present-day railway lines are part of the Ordnance Survey OpenData that I was using for the background map, so it was easy enough to trace over those. However, disused lines are not included, so I had to refer to old maps to see their routes and then draw them onto my map as best I could. For the dates, I referred to several books and websites – “An Illustrated History of Edinburgh’s Railways”, and the corresponding volume for Glasgow, were particularly valuable. Where possible, the event dates are accurate to the nearest day, although the current viewer only cares about the year.

The whole data set for Edinburgh, loaded into the editor

I think I made the right choice in creating my own map editor – if I’d used existing software, it’s doubtful that I would have got the maps done any more quickly. There would have been a learning curve of course, but even after I’d got past that, it’s doubtful that I would have been as productive in a general map editor as I was in my specialised one.

Step 3: The Viewer

The viewer was the final piece of the jigsaw, and although I’d given it some thought, I didn’t properly start work on it until the Edinburgh map data was nearly completed. Unlike for the editor, there was only one real choice of technology for the viewer – if I wanted it to run on a web page and work across virtually all modern devices, it was going to have to be HTML5.

HTML5 extends previous versions of HTML with new elements like the canvas tag, which allows graphics to be rendered in real-time from JavaScript – in days gone by, this required a plug-in such as Flash or Java, but now it can be done in a vanilla browser without anything added. I hadn’t used the canvas before, but a bit of quick experimentation confirmed that it was more than capable of doing everything I needed for my interactive map. I also made use of the JQuery library to simplify operations such as fetching the map data from the web server in the background.

First, I wrote a small library of line drawing routines for all the different sorts of railways: dashed lines for tunnels, crossed lines for freight, and dashed-line-within-solid-line for single track railways (as used on some OS maps). These aren’t supported directly by the canvas, but it only took just over a hundred lines of JavaScript code to add them. Then I was ready to build a map renderer on top.

Different line styles and their uses

I had a basic version up and running pretty quickly, but it took a lot longer to implement all the features I wanted: background images, scrolling and zooming, the slider for changing the date, clicking on items for more information. Getting the background images lined up perfectly with the lines and stations turned out to be the trickiest part, though it really shouldn’t have been hard. It took me an embarrassingly long time of debugging before I realised I was truncating a scaling factor to two decimal places in one place but not in another, and once that was fixed everything looked fine.

It lives! The finished product

There are still a few things that annoy me about the end product (the mobile browser and touch screen support, especially, could be better), but overall I’m pretty happy with it. It was fun to create and I learned a lot in the process… about the history of the local railways of course; about how geographical data is stored and processed; about programming GUIs with Qt; and about creating interactive graphics using HTML5.

As someone who’s suffered a lot from depression myself, this obviously makes me very upset and angry. The welfare system in this country is failing vulnerable people badly, and yet hardly anyone seems to care. This wasn’t the only case that’s resulted in a death that was directly attributable to the system: the case of David Clapson, a diabetic ex-soldier who died after his benefits were stopped, leaving him unable to pay for food or for electricity to keep his insulin refrigerated, has become quite well known. There are many other cases documented online as well, although shamefully very few of them seem to get reported in the mainstream media.

Of course, it would be virtually impossible to run something as large and complex as a whole country without sometimes causing problems for some of your citizens. Any big change, even if it’s clearly for the best overall, will still have adverse consequences for a few people. For example, if the government opens a big new hospital out of town and closes several old ones, some people who lived closer to the old hospitals might die because they can’t get to the new one in time in an emergency situation, even if the superior facilities of the new hospital save more lives overall. Although that would be a tragedy for the individuals and their families concerned, most people would understand that the decision made sense in the bigger picture.

I don’t believe the same thing can be said of the benefit-related deaths, though. These events weren’t random tragedies, or one-in-a-million corner cases that nobody could possibly have predicted. Those deaths were direct consequences of two current welfare policies: firstly, “sanctioning” people on Jobseekers’ Allowance for trivial (and sometimes even non-existent) infractions, leaving them with no income whatsoever; and secondly, forcing people who aren’t in a fit state to work into a system they can’t cope with. If you’re going to take away support from people who don’t have any other support, or bully them into doing things they’re not at all ready for, of course it’s going to end badly. It was obvious to any intelligent person who bothered to think about it what was likely to happen.

But apparently I’m on the wrong side of public opinion here; we’re endlessly told that the welfare cuts are popular and long overdue. It’s true that a lot of people do want the benefit system tightened up to make things harder for “scroungers”, but when you talk to them about it, most of them also want truly vulnerable people to be protected. It’s just a shame that they’re cheering on, and voting for, “reforms” that are hugely damaging to those same vulnerable people they supposedly want to help.

The trouble is, outside of articles in the tabloid press and anecdotes in the pub, there really aren’t that many scroungers and frauds. When you actually look at the statistics of the welfare system (which are by no means perfect, but still the best tool for understanding that we have), they consistently tell the same story: the fraud rate is very low (generally around 0-2%); unemployment benefits don’t cost account for very much of the welfare budget (compared to, for example, old age pensions and housing benefit); most people on Jobseekers’s Allowance are on it for a relatively short time between jobs, rather than living off it for years on end as the Sun and the Mail would have you believe.

So all of the “toughening up” of the benefits system is actually solving a problem that, for the most part, didn’t actually exist in the first place. But in the process, it’s creating much worse problems, like the deaths mentioned above. Of course there will be a few scroungers and cheats claiming benefits. No system is perfect, so it’s never going to be possible to eliminate them entirely. The statistics show that the number of them is already very low, which is probably about the best we can hope for.

But even if you’re determined that even so much as one undeserving scrounger living off the state is an unacceptable travesty, it’s doubtful that making claimants jump through ever more hoops is going to help much. Who do you think is really going to be more inconvenienced by having to pass ever-more stringent checks… someone who’s perfectly capable of working but instead chooses to game the system, or someone who’s genuinely struggling with a mental or physical illness? Who is going to be better able to deal with negotiating the increasingly harrowing system… someone who’s already adept at getting as much money out of it as possible, or someone who’s been pushed close to the edge by events beyond their control and is stressed, exhausted and confused? Making the system even tougher is only going to hurt those who need it the most.

“What would you do different, then?” you might reasonably ask. “At least the government is trying to reform the system. What’s your answer, just keep giving out free money to anyone who wants it?”.

Here’s what I would do differently:

Scrap the Work Capability Assessment and have people signed off sick by their own doctor instead. Apparently GPs don’t want this additional workload, but they already manage to sign working people off sick, so I don’t see why passing a sick note to the DWP is so much harder than passing one to an employer. The GP is much more likely to have a full and accurate picture of an individual’s situation, so this would radically cut down on the number of spurious “fit for work” decisions.

JSA sanctions should be monitored much more robustly to make sure that they’re fair and reasonable. In addition, only a maximum of 25% of someone’s benefits should ever be removed. This would still be enough to give people an incentive not to get sanctioned, but wouldn’t leave anyone completely destitute. I’m aware that this would lead to people still getting paid benefits even if they refuse to look for work, but frankly I’d much rather have that than risk another David Clapson… and if you disagree, I think you need to have a good long think about it.

Publicise the statistics I mentioned above a lot more, and show people that there’s a good side to the welfare safety net. For far too long, the Tories and the tabloids have made out that it’s nothing but a burden, “stealing” money from hardworking people and giving it to the lazy. The facts simply don’t back up that point of view and it needs to be challenged.

I’m just back from a week long trip to Belgium. I had a work meeting in Ghent on Monday and Tuesday, but Laura was able to come out and join me afterwards, so we decided to make it into a little holiday and explore Bruges and Antwerp before coming home.

This wasn’t my first time in Belgium; I had a similar meeting in Ghent nearly two years ago, but it ended up being my only foreign work trip in several years that I didn’t really enjoy. Nothing to do with Belgium, though, which seemed a nice enough place… mostly just because of the overwrought state I’d rather foolishly managed to get myself into by going on three other trips away in the few weeks preceding it. So I spent most of my time there (not very long as I couldn’t stay on after my meeting that time) wishing I was at home on my own and didn’t have to deal with any of it. Thankfully this time was a lot better.

I was away for seven nights in total, but I ended up staying in five different hotels in total, and my first four nights were all in different places. It wasn’t ideal, but there was a logic to it (basically, I wanted to stay near the airport the first night as I was flying in so late, and after the meeting I didn’t want to stay in the same hotel as it was expensive and work wouldn’t pay for another night). It did mean I got a bit fed up with wheeling all my luggage around with me for most of the first few days and was glad when I finally arrived in Bruges and was able to stay in the same room for more than about five minutes.

The first hotel was OK, except that it wasn’t as close to the airport as the name would have you believe, and the air in the room was so dry that I didn’t sleep very well. On the plus side, my room had a nice balcony overlooking the nearby motorway. Also on the plus side, the dryness woke me up while the lunar eclipse was going on so I managed to see some of it after all (though I didn’t, in my semi-conscious state, manage to get any decent photos of it unfortunately).

The Belgian trains seemed cheap, efficient and (the ones I ended up on, at least) mostly empty, so getting to the meeting was quite easy and painless, though I did have a long sweaty walk with all my luggage once I got to Ghent as the station isn’t very near the city centre. Our meeting venue was suitably grand:

After a good day of discussion, we had the conference meal. I had been gearing up for a big rant about this, because the venue insisted on everyone in the group having the same thing, which is one of my pet hates when it comes to catering. But the food was so delicious, and the chef’s moustache so worthy of Hercule Poirot’s native land, that I’ll forgive them this time. The starter wouldn’t have been to all tastes as it consisted mostly of raw meat, something I’d never eaten before, but it was much nicer than I expected.

After the meeting finished, I had one day to kill on my own before Laura arrived on Wednesday night. I’d decided to stay in Ghent for this since I didn’t get to see much of it last time, and I was very glad I did. My hostel (the building on the right with the crow-step gables in the photo below) was a lovely old building with friendly staff and good facilities.

(Only problem was, I think spending the night there re-awakened the part of me that loves to go hostelling, but one night didn’t feel like enough and I probably won’t get the chance to do it again for ages now, which is kind of frustrating. Bah. Oh well, I can surf around online and plan adventures for next summer, I guess).

I spent my evening doing the final week 9 run of Couch to 5K (which I’ll probably write a whole post about soon) at a nice park, then treating myself to a steak at one of the many pavement cafes to celebrate, followed by some good local beer in the hostel lounge. The next morning, I wandered round and took photos. Ghent has a very pretty old town so it was a good place to do this, and I was very lucky with the weather as well.

My favourite thing in Ghent (apart from the lovely hostel) was the belfry. Every quarter hour the bells play a tune – not just a short chime sequence like a lot of clocks back home, but a full-on polyphonic tune with melody and harmonies and everything. You can climb up and admire the view from the top (which is very pretty in most directions, but surprisingly industrial to the north), but even better, you can go in the “clock room” and watch the mechanism that works the clock faces and rings the bells. The bell sequence is controlled by a huge metal drum, a bit like a giant music box, that rotates while the tunes are playing.

(These sort of things kinda fascinate me. For some reason, when I was very small, I always wanted to be a clock maker. In reality as an adult, I don’t think I would have the patience or the dexterity for that and would probably have got bored with it by now if I was doing it full time, but it’s interesting to see examples of the craft occasionally).

Next, it was off to Bruges! I had time to check into hotel no. 4 and have a much-needed nap before Laura arrived. The hotel was unusual: all of the rooms had doors opening to the outside world rather than a hotel corridor, so it felt very like the sort of cheap American motel that you see in films (I’ve never seen one in real life but I assume they exist). It was fine though, apart from the connecting door to the next room which, although locked at least, didn’t block sound very well.

Bruges, like Ghent, was a very picturesque place to wander round and soak up the sights. Or even better, sail round. We took a boat tour round the canals, which is something I like to do whenever possible in a new city (done London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and possibly others now). The only slight disappointment was that the boat didn’t go through the long-ish canal tunnel I’d noticed on the map and then couldn’t resist going to have a look at when we were in the area.

There was also a belfry that seemed quite similar to the one in Ghent, though we didn’t go inside this time. It must be a traditional Belgian thing.

We left our two days in Antwerp ’til last, and to be honest it was a bit of an anticlimax compared to the other cities. There was nothing wrong with it particularly, it just didn’t seem to have much going on compared with the other places we’d been. I had a similar experience in Frankfurt earlier in the year… nothing much wrong with it, just didn’t live up to the other German cities I’d visited and loved (Berlin, Munich, Leipzig, Heidelberg). Apologies if anyone from Antwerp (or Frankfurt) is reading!

The highlight for me was the very impressive main station building:

Our Antwerp hotel was quite a long way out, among the seemingly endless stretch of ports to the north west of the city centre. On weekends the buses didn’t even go to it and we had to get off quite a distance away and walk to it. But on the plus side, it was right next to an amazing (and very popular seeming) world buffet restaurant where I ate far too much Chinese food, doughnuts and profiteroles on the first night.

As is often the case, I felt ready to go home by the end of the trip. I’d enjoyed it, but I was starting to get travel fatigue after moving from hotel room to hotel room so many times in a week, and I had lots to do at home… during my meeting, emails seemed to be pouring in giving me new tasks on my other project.

I’d like to thank several organisations for making the trip much more interesting than it otherwise would have been. Firstly, my bank for sending my new debit card to the wrong address. The old one then expired at the end of September while I was still away, so for half the trip I couldn’t get money out from my main account. Secondly, Sony for pushing an update to my phone just before I set off that pretty much halved the battery life – just what I needed when I was going to be away from home and away from easily accessible plug sockets for several days. And last but not least, my web hosting provider for rejecting my monthly payment for absolutely no reason whatsoever (at first I thought this must be due to the debit card expiring, but it was nothing to do with that – it worked fine when I redid it manually). It would have been so dull just travelling around beautiful European cities without all that stuff to keep me occupied.

"I think who [gcat] is, really, is a very caring and non-judgemental person... and a bit of a nerd. And for me, that word has no negative connotations whatsoever. He's not one of those trendy new nerds who are basically normal people who like superhero movies. He's a proper, old-school nerd who gets absolutely obsessed with the most obscure subjects, regardless of whether anyone else is into them or not".